The research is rooted in the work Gustav Theodor Fechner, who laid the foundations for an inductive aesthetic perspective by empiric experimental research, Vorschule der Ästhetik (1876). In 1933 George D. Birkhoff first proposed a quantifiable aesthetic value for simple shapes. Today we start to see the concept of Aesthetic Complexity finding its way into the discourse on aesthetics. It focuses on larger compositions of elements using a computational approach.

The ongoing research seeks to extend the findings by Guy Birkin on Aesthetic Complexity to a spatial architectural setting. Birkin proposes a framework for measuring visual complexity by correlating it with image compression. The transfer to a spatial domain in done by linking the perceived level of detail to the distance to between viewer and object.

There are possible links to be made to the findings of empirical aesthetics in music and literature by Menninghaus / Wald-Fuhrmann at the MPI for Empirical Aesthetic

The ongoing research was presented in a lecture at the Städelschule, January 14. 2016.

For the first Design Data Berlin - BIM Roundtable 15.03.2016 informance invites experts of leading German design practices. It is planed to have this as a reoccurring event, where the agenda is defined by the community of participants.

The aim is to run all parametric changes to the geometry on server side. The demo below invites to create new color patterns.

Open app in new new window

Low-poly artwork by Matthias Beermann, SAC APD 2014

Terra I is comprised of 3.5 mm polygonal birch panels covering a wide range of shapes and sizes, connected by intricate 3D printed nodes. The humps, peaks, crevasse, and folds come in different intensities, pointing at certain directions such as the entrance, the lounge, the counter. The installation aims to add to the experience of the space where customers spend time while going through the stages of a new styling.

Terra I at Salon Bordel!

The form is digitally designed and all 90 polygons are constraint to be planar. The 130 connecting nodes are computer generated based on a design template. They meet the geometric requirements such as the angles between plates and width of the shadow gaps for each connection. In addition to these technical necessities they are individually detailed giving each node its unique ornamental fingerprint. All fabrication data for laser cutting of the plywood plates as well as 3D printing the nodes, is generated automatically off the design model.

Birch Plywood Panels and SLS Node Connectors

Each node is laser sintered (SLS) in polyamide and spray painted. The surfaces of the birch plywood plates are hand finished after laser cutting. All parts are assembled manually by putting each node in its specified location. The entire installation of around 11 m2 weights less than 30 kg.

Nodes

Assembly Detail

Quantitative Aesthetics – Shape Range Diagram

NODE Festival the biennial forum for digital arts is taking place April 27. to May 2. in Frankfurt.

NODE15 is dedicated to the negotiation of the human body throughout current technological developments and how this is being expressed in our present projects; utopias; and fictions. We will reflect on processes of embodiment; the integral role of the body in perception and interaction; as location of implicit knowledge; and as a tool we constantly try to extend and optimize.

The Architecture and Performative Design specialization has been invite to show Digital Bodies at Naxoshalle.

3D printed sculptures – photograph by Ragunath Vragunath

On Thursday April Mirco Becker has the honor chairing the conference session on Virtual Realities & the Future of Interaction Design as part of the one day symposium featuring three artists, designers and researches:

Mark Farid

For 24 hours a day for 28 days, Mark Farid is planning to wear a VR Headset through which he will experience life through another person’s eyes and ears.  Over the course of the project, it will become apparent whether Mark will begin to lose his own sense of self, and start to inhabit the reality of the other person. www.meta-narrative.co.uk

Pedro Lopes

He is working at Prof. Patrick Baudisch’s Human Computer Interaction lab at HPI in Potsdam, and published various papers about kickable computing. Currently he is working on a system to read & write directly to the user’s body using electrical muscle stimulation. pedro-lopes-music

Mark Lukas

After coauthoring the seminal book “Prototying Interfaces”,Mark Lukas explores various olfactorics solutions and the possibilities and problems of designing interactions with scents. He currently is working on a starter kit allowing interaction designers controlling scents using Arduino and vvvv. hpi human-computer-interaction

Prototyping

The bracelet is digitally designed and 3D printed as wax model. A raw brass form cast via a lost-wax method. The brass is hand polished and electroplated with 18K gold. 3D printing, casting, polishing and plating is done at the factory of the future by Shapeways.

Realtime design feedback on minimum material thickness

The material thickness is carefully adjust using a custom interface which gives color coded feedback on the dimensions and highlights areas which exceed the minimum thickness in the 3D printing process.

Variance in shape size

The Guggenheim Museum Helsinki is integrated into the chain of public activities from the Esplanadi to the Market Square and finally the Olympiaterminaali. It is oriented along the waterfront. At the north facing entrance the building is aligned to the neighbouring urban gridded fabric. The axis of Södra Magasinsgatan is extended and set back to create a welcoming plaza when entering the Guggenheim. In the south the Museum extends beyond the building envelope and is blurring the boundaries between cultural space (Museum), infrastructure (Port), and landscaping (Tähtitornin Vuori). This is where the Solid Network forms artificial landscape features creating a space that allows for summer expansions of the building. Functional delivery comes via the goods entrance at the south accessed by the port by-road.

All galleries are elevated off the ground floor, creating an generous internal street-scape, allowing city activities to blur in and cultural activity to radiate out. The massing oscillates between clean lines and moments of crystallisation – aiming to mediate the internal life of the building with the life of the city of Helsinki.

Tectonic System

The Solid Network, is the main structural and tectonic system of the building. A cast concrete space-frame which lifts up the galleries and supports the building envelope. It creates the necessary structural redundancy by its entanglement. The Solid Network is clad with panels of varying opacity. They are supported by Feuillage, a layer of elements which are part of the panel fixing. At the same time it creates the effect of a tectonic veil. The gallery spaces are wooden Hulls connected by pathway and ramps of the same material. In contrast to the expressive main structure the interior of the galleries is neutrally calm. The only tension exists between the seamless light ceiling and the rough wooden flooring.

Entrance facade – Visualization by bloomimages

Internal Spaces

The Guggenheim is entered from the north. The lobby of the Museum reveals the richness one could only sense from the outside. It gives view to the elongated central space. This space is modelled similar to an urban street-scape in proportions as well as in function. The galleries on the first and second floor are accessed by ramps, a feature staircase facing the waterfront or panoramic elevators. On the second floor there is a deck allowing gallery functions to extend to the outside. The bridges connecting the galleries in conjunction with the Solid Network create the impression of a Piranesian space.

View along a bridge at 1st floor into a gallery space

Entrance hall

Construction

The main structural system – Solid Network – is using Ultra High Performance Concrete (UHPC) in combination with an ice based moulding technique. This allows for a feasible fabrication method for complex moment connections. The structure rests on a raft foundation. The Solid Network supports the gallery Hulls, a timber construction with high quality wood finishes. All galleries have a light ceiling which allows for a mix of natural and artificial light. The envelope and facade is a unitised system of glass and sandwich panels supported by frames of engineered wood.

Winter impression – Visualization by bloomimages

Summer impression – Visualization by bloomimages

Environmental Consideration – Climatic Layering

The foot print of the building is 9.000 sqm with total gross floor area of 14.000 sqm. The building is designed around the concept of climatic layering where highly conditioned spaces are surrounded by spaces with increasing climatic flux. The programmatic implications are embraced and played out. Seasonal changes to the functional permeability of the building are intended. The centre piece of the building are the elevated galleries which provide a climatically stable spaces throughout the year. The Solid Network adds considerable thermal mass to the building. The public zones of the building are less conditioned. The atrium in the south is designed as a buffer that would allow to extend the building into the open during the summer months.

Water front view – Visualization by bloomimages

Solid Network, ice moulding system – Developed by Vasily Sitnikov at SAC APD

Facade Feuillage – Developed by Sabina Eivazova at SAC APD

 

Competition: Guggenheim Helsinki, September 2014, first phase

Design: Mirco Becker with Sabina Eivazova and Vasily Sitnikov

Exterior Images by: bloomimages

4 Modes of Performative Design

Models have always been an integral part of the architectural design process. Todays performative-design-models are more than simply representations of a project, they are advanced systems. Such a system captures design dependencies and allows to evaluate performance before realisation. The presentation highlights how such performative-models are used exploratively in design research at the Städelschule Architecture Class (SAC) as well as in practice on large scale projects and product development. The very essence of these models is to capture design knowledge on project requirements, building performance, and fabrication logic. The challenge of such models is to balance the richness of content with the agility for design exploration. In that sense the performative-model is an extension of the Building Information Model (BIM) paradigm; design is paramount.

Arkimeet Istanbul, Nov. 20. 2014, Image courtesy of Arkimeet

The full version of this article was published in SAC Journal 1. It discusses how postgraduate programmes like SAC have contributed over the last decade to an inclusive environment of architectural production that spans different offices, schools and even disciplines. In its dimension and use we can regard this environment as an operating system on which architectural design is run. It is on the verge of being the third pillar in architecture besides built work and theory. It does not promote any style or agenda. It is here to stay and evolve.

Undeniably we do not have to promote digital techniques any longer. They have arrived in everyday life and are here to stay. The current discourse on the post-digital emphasises this point. The notion of the post-digital could be summed up as the state of living in a world where the digital is accepted and commonplace. Nicholas Negroponte was right when he claimed the digital revolution already happened before the turn of the millennium.

Of all inventions in the digital realm it is the internet and its ability to network minds and hardware which have had the biggest impact so far. Today we experience a shift where singular hardware devices lose their importance to an ecosystem of synced and networked objects, exhibiting the tendency of the digital to link processes. The very same tendencies are also basis for new forms of collective co-creation.

What technology wants

One could marvel at or be suspicious of digital technologies, but there is simply no going back. Their effects keep unfolding, driven by the accumulation of data, the processing of information and the consolidation of knowledge. It is a laborious and creative effort made by individuals and collectives. The discoveries and inventions made are often already embedded in the very nature of technology. This is Kevin Kelly’s thesis, discussed in What Technology Wants, where he argues that technology develops along an inherent trajectory. Kelly points out that innovations like the internet are not chance discoveries or a stroke of genius but inevitable after the discovery and application of electricity by Bell, Edison and others in the late 19th century.

This goes for every technology. Our close relation to technology is bi-directional: As much as we have an urge to invent things, technology offers itself to be innovated on. The point is that someone who wants to partake in technological innovation has to find means to access one of the inherent trajectories of innovation. Now, since the act of designing can be defined as the state of being open to possibilities inherent to the subject at hand, design and innovation are two sides of the same coin. Only by uncovering and understanding these processes can one unleash their generative potential.

Operating systems

Along with the digital revolution an entirely new layer of technology was introduced: The operating system, a software layer that binds and manages all underlaying hardware as well as providing the interfaces for applications to run atop. These systems are mega technologies in themselves and probably the largest systems created by humans. The UNIX system alone, with all the sub-systems evolving out of it such as Linux, Mac OS X, and Google Chromium, is a vivid proof of this unprecedented scale in technology.

This was only made possible by the digital allowing collaborations in large quantities and providing the means to consolidate knowledge. This phenomenon is not exclusive to the traditional notion of operating systems managing low level hard- and software processes, it includes new forms of collective digital creation. Wikipedia and Python illustrate this communal effort of knowledge consolidation, compression and abstraction. This development also impacted on creative disciplines and art. Firstly on digital audio and secondly on digital imagery, causing fundamental changes to how we create, distribute and consume these media.

The OS of Architecture

Since the early 1990s, a parallel development to that described above, has taken place in architecture, resulting in the discipline’s very own operating system. This operating system consists of methods, concepts, processes and technologies – a framework in which contemporary architectural design happens. It includes CAD systems, script libraries, mathematical and geometrical concepts, bidirectional interfaces to engineering analysis, links to prototyping and fabrication technology. In contrast to the OS of computing devices, the OS of Architecture has not been masterminded or consciously led by a single individual or corporation but rather created through collective effort. In this ongoing development new “features” get prototyped, tested, integrated or rejected. For the first time in the history of architecture there is an entity that accumulates design knowledge outside the array of buildings, wisdom and theory. It does not even propagate a style. I would argue that, beside discourse and built work, the OS of Architecture has become a third pillar of the discipline where meaningful contributions to the larger architectural undertaking can be made.

The OS of Architecture is everything but a set of tools; we cannot simply confuse it with a traditional palette of pen, ruler, compass, French curves and spline weights. The main difference to a collection of tools is that all its features and elements are being hosted in the same medium, the digital. Thereby they can evolve, hybridise and interlink – much like in an ecosystem.

Since the pandoras box of digital design was opened in 1992 with the Paperless Studio at Columbia GSAPP, there have been some very successful academic programmes – be it the AADRL in London5, the ICD at TU Stuttgart 6 or the DFABARCH at the ETH Zurich, that have built upon the work and accomplishments at GSAPP. What these programmes have in common is a lack of method and curriculum regarding design education. Instead they have been built around the notion of design research where the analysis of any found phenomena is not primarily used to argue for a single designed object but to construct a system which has the generative capacity to provide a range of possible solutions. More importantly and concomitant to the multiplicity of solutions, it became widely accepted to work with design iterations by which the designed-candidates’ performance could be tested in specific environments. These feedback loops are the perfect example of a first order cybernetic model. At a larger scale it is exactly the same model which laid the foundations for an architectural OS.

The OS was created in a collective effort, initiated at academic programmes and soon after pursued in architectural practice, software development and new forms of publishing. This is still an ongoing process. Where previous periods in architecture were often defined by a vocabulary and repertoire of style, the current model works on the accumulation and consolidation of processes.

In the mid-1990s animation software was used experimentally in some graduate programmes, like the Paperless Studio at Columbia GSAPP, and by pioneers in practice. The reason this seemed more interesting than general purpose 3d CAD packages was that it allowed to set things in motion by inter-dependencies, thus controlling a relative complex outcome via a chain of cascading dependencies. Several mechanisms catered for this functionality, but at the core was a directed, acyclic graph – a computational concept where each object computes its state from object-specific input parameters received from other objects. It was clear that any further development could not do without bettering that computational concept. And so they came, parametric design applications like Generative Components, Grasshopper™ and Design Script, which utilise and expose the underlaying graph structure as the main interface of design. As these applications evolved, they also accumulated design knowledge. Navigating on a freeform surface and placing architectural elements in a meaningful manner onto it was once a technical challenge only to be mastered by scripting or programming the solution. This expertise got consolidated and now sits on the graphic user interface (GUI) of many design applications. Along with the sophistication of the applications’ core functionality came the ability to link internal processes to external applications, analytical methods and manufacturing devices.

The OS of Architecture is the sum of these developments: the techniques, methods, processes and most importantly the interconnection between all of them.

Style

A broad range of architectural agendas and paradigms run on the OS of Architecture. Its unifying nature includes positions from ‘Parametricism’ (Patrik Schumacher) or ‘digital Morphogenesis’ (Michael Hensel, Achim Menges) to biological paradigms (Alisa Andrasek, Francois Roche) and exuberant formalism (Hernan Diaz Alonso).

The fact that two such different practices as Foster & Partners (F&P) and Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) can run on the OS of Architecture proves that something bigger than style is at play. Both of these offices have altered their method of design dramatically over the last 10 years, embracing parametric techniques, programmatic problem solving and form generation as well as performance-driven design.

So, despite their historic differences, they have a lot more in common today than one expects at first glance. This commonality goes beyond simply employing the same technology of production, and it is well demonstrated by the fact that the shared technology comes closely associated with an inclusive discourse on architectural geometry, design scripting culture, digital craft and robotic fabrication. Practices apparently as different to one another as F&P and ZHA might even use the same sediment of architectural ideas such as the articulated single surface, obviously dressed up differently in the resulting buildings. Thus, the commonality notwithstanding, the actual artefacts of both practices remain distinct and in line with their respective agendas.

Patrik Schumacher has argued that we have entered a new era of architectural style, one that is not transitional but here to last. However and despite Schumacher advocating an emergent parametric style, the comparison of F&P and ZHA across the shared technology and expertise shows that style is not at the core of the new era. It rather comprises a new layer of technology and furthermore, following Kevin Kelly’s argument, it does not require a manifesto since it is driven along its own, inherent trajectory of development.

The third pillar

Much like the digital has become ubiquitous, the OS of Architecture is also all-pervasive. Even those who oppose its most extreme and stylistic design results, cannot withdraw from it. Unless one steps completely out in pursuit of a manual arts and crafts approach to design, it is very difficult to offer an alternative and relevant methodological model for contemporary architecture. As much as one sees the OS of Architecture responsible for a collapse of distinctions in practice as illustrated above with F&P and ZHA, this is not true for the discourse on architecture. The traditional architectural discourse and the one on the OS of Architecture are different and, till now, largely separate.

Insofar as the OS of Architecture is a pillar to the discipline, adding to the code base of architecture is an equally valid contribution to the architectural endeavour and the development of the discipline as realising buildings or publishing theory. This allows for new players to participate in very different ways than before. It is true for single handed efforts such as David Rutten’s development of Grasshopper™, corporate ventures like Gehry Technologies’ Digital Project™ or Gramazio & Kohler’s systematic introduction of robots to architecture. Furthermore, a few graduate programmes have emerged as great contributors too by pulling technology (animation software, subdivision surfaces, script libraries) into the design process, by developing new methods and consolidating proven ones (form-finding, agent systems, space syntax) and by creating project evidence of experimental methods.